Apps are going to get a lot smarter with help from Microsoft Office

Today, Microsoft officially released the Microsoft Graph, a nerdy
solution that opens the doors wide for developers to do a lot
more with Microsoft Office.

The critical idea here is the "application programming
interface," or API. Programs use APIs to talk to each
other — popular fitness app Runtastic, for example, uses the
Google Maps API to display a real-time map on the app.

The Microsoft Graph, first announced in beta back in April, is a
set of APIs that blow open the
Microsoft Office 365 productivity cloud to developers,
letting them build apps that take a user's data and put
it to use in cool, new ways.

Basically, it means that any developer can build an app that taps
straight into the data that lives inside Office 365, making their
wares smarter and faster.

"It's not just all about Microsoft," says Rob Lefferts, Microsoft
general manager of Office exentensibility. "It's a
huge starting set of information."

And just like Facebook's famous social graph, the Microsoft Graph
lets developers ask questions of the data like, "Who does my
customer work closely with?" The intelligence is handled by
Microsoft on the back end. (And no, it's not as creepy as it
might sound — like any other app, you'd have to give it
permission to access data.)

For instance, Lefferts says, over 850 million meetings per
month get booked via Microsoft Outlook for Office 365. That means
that there's tons of data there for an enterprising app developer
to build a predictive calendar based on how users spend their
time.

Microsoft
Graph

At launch, the Microsoft Graph supports data from sources
like e-mail, the address book, and calendars. Later, it'll
be able to support data taken from OneDrive storage, OneNote
cloud notes, and other Microsoft data.

The Office Graph also goes both ways. For example, security
startup Skyhigh Networks is already using the
Microsoft Graph to enforce enterprise policies on customers'
Office 365 installations, scanning and quarantining files that
live in the cloud.

For developers, the first taste of Microsoft Graph is free,
Lefferts says. But if they're using Microsoft Office data at
volume in their own apps via Microsoft Graph, the company will
collect a fee.

It will be a while before most developers figure out how to best
access all that data, since the Microsoft Graph is new.